We're talking real blackberries here

It was a very hot July afternoon and we were hungry and groggy, having taken the early morning flight from Charlotte to Washington D.C. Google maps had made us get off one metro stop too early for the second time (the first time was in Paris) and we were lugging our bags around with no clue about how much farther away our hotel was. There was a whole line of Ethiopian restaurants on the street but they were all closed as it was past lunchtime when, miraculously, we came across the cheerful looking Cafe Saint Ex almost yelling to us to come on in already in a slight but very endearing French accent.

I really must add a bit of background right here to address the crucial question of why write about the prosaic incident of finding a cafe while walking around in Washington D.C. A few years ago, when I was still a student, my French lessons had become my outlet for my limited imagination and I used to find myself gladly conjugating verbs in the subjonctif imparfait and writing something about how la vie sucked and not completing my practical record for Statistics, which was one of my majors in graduation. Those French classes had all the appeal to make me want to spend all my time learning the language - a) It was French b) It would not help me one bit in earning my real degree in Statistics, Math and Economics. At some point during our fourth year of learning French, we were asked to review a book and present it to the class. That was the time I briefly gave up on doing everything and limited myself to reading and re-reading Vol de Nuit (Night Flight) by Antoine de Saint-Exupery.

The book, written in the 1930s is about the pilot Fabien who works for a commercial airmail company in Argentina and is tasked with flying out during a storm to deliver mail. His boss Riviere has committed to himself to take on the most fearful risks to make commercial airmail more viable than other means of delivery such as rail or road. He is undeterred even when some of his pilots have lost their lives just to adhere to his instructions of departing on time irrespective of what the weather is like. The narrative is very simple and presents the story from the point of view of Fabien, Riviere and Fabien's wife. All I remember now are disconnected passages - about how Fabien is able to see the porch of a house from his lonely perch in the middle of the night sky and wonders if the person in that house knows that someone many miles up in the sky watched the lights of their house go off, the other about how he looks at the stars all around him and takes in the bejewelled death trap he is in after he realises that he is going to die in the storm that he knew about even before taking off.

This book was published in 1933 and in 1944, Saint-Exupery, who had previously been a pilot himself, died almost the very same way Fabien did, except that he was on a mission to get intelligence from Germany for the Allies. After that obsessive compulsive reading of Vol de Nuit, I chanced upon the ultimate work of published genius that is The Little Prince by Saint-Ex and that permanently altered the rank-ordering of the Greatest People Ever that is a running list in my head.

And that afternoon, when we entered the cafe, there were models of what seemed like WW1 and WW2 aircrafts and propellers hanging down from the ceiling, there were pictures of Antoine de Saint-Exupery and I ate the best French toast with blackberry compote in the world. The bookshelf they had there wasn't as big as it should have been for a place like that. But then I took one more bite of the toast and looked all around me and knew that while life would largely want to make me scibble furiously about the many ways in which it goes wrong, this was one of those rare moments, like the lining up of major celestial bodies in a straight line is for astronomers, which I had to soak in entirely and carefully note down.

Zinda har pyaar rahen

It is day 4 in Vina del Mar, Chile, our new home and we feel like we have been here a while already, and I mean that in a good way. The people here are among the friendliest I have come across anywhere. I do not see why everyone everywhere cannot be as nice as Vina del Marians. Owing to the proximity of the Indian features and skin tone to the Latin American ones, we are constantly mistaken for localites and people go on to utter a few sentences in rapid Spanish before we can sadly remind them that we know 'no espanol'. We are working on learning Spanish as it is embarrassing to be at the receiving end of such warmth and to not be able to communicate in the local language.

We have been exploring the area around where we live and that mainly comprises of long walks along the sparkling blue Pacific. Yesterday, while walking around and taking pictures, we came across some very friendly street dogs. One of them invited himself into a game of beach volleyball that two boys were playing and jumped cheerfully towards the sky every single time one of them served. He reminded me so much of Jolly, our very friendly canine friend in Bangalore who had none of the cautious judiciousness of street dogs and was always too happy to welcome anyone into our home. She is really a Latina in her soul, that one.

Stepping back a bit and taking in the larger picture - we have moved to Chile - that oddly shaped country I knew nothing about 4 months ago! There is a certain definiteness around new beginnings that comes from moving into a new country, which does not come with invented mileposts such as New Years and birthdays. While I am always the brooding, over-analysing, inwardly nitpicking kind, I find that an overwhelming change of physical scenery can help me snap out of a phase and at the very least, attempt to forget the people and events that have turned me into a radically cynical adult. It is also easier to completely write off others' judgements and the need for validation in a place where there really is nobody else whose opinion can matter in my decisions (my other half obviously does not come under 'others' ). Long haul flights provide just the right ambience for soul-searching with all those clouds floating past and with the sense of not belonging to any real time-zone. In the journey to Chile, I thought of all the people who have known and cared for me for the longest time now and how I want to be seen in their eyes as the person they have always known me to be and not as this icy, reticent person I sometimes find myself to be. So many words that have been held back at all the wrong times, so many hugs I should have gotten up and given.

Vina del mar is Spanish for 'Vineyard by the sea' and gets its name from all the famous vineyards around here. We helped ourselves to a glass of the exquisite local red wine tonight. A part of all this is probably the wine talking. In the spirit of wine-induced clichés, *raises her glass* this one is for new beginnings.

The back drive

My college has long driveways leading up from the main and back gates to the main porch. There are these short elevated stone platforms lining the entire stretch of the two drives for students to sit on. These drives, as they have come to be called, are arguably the backdrop of nearly everyone’s most enduring memories of their time in college. I do believe that these drives made all the difference in giving my college the kind of personality that came to be associated with it. The back drive in particular was the zone of simply letting go. It is shadier than the front drive because of the older, bigger trees there and it used to get filled up quickly with people during any kind of leisure break or unpopular classes.

My best memories of college are sitting on that drive and having the most engrossing conversations with my best friend, or sometimes just watching the world go by with a book in our hands. We were a part of a bigger group of friends and it was common for us all to sit out a few hours of the day on that drive. We were also always within earshot of the other groups of people around us and we would often see someone from somewhere else laugh out loud at something funny one of us had said, leaving the funny person feeling terribly pleased about her comic skills or hear someone else continue a song one of us had started to hum. I remember this one day when one of the many stray dogs that our college had adopted had a long loud sneezing bout in the middle of the drive. Everyone on the drive had gone completely quiet to watch him and cheered for him once he stopped. He sheepishly ran away from our sight, not knowing how to receive the sudden attention. I remember being able to sit back on that drive and letting go of all the small big worries that came when graduation started seeming more like a tangible reality than a distant hurdle and being able to slowly accept circumstances at one severe low point in my life. Most of all, I remember all of us being completely at ease with and totally unapologetic for the people we were and having a lot of fun together, perhaps much more than some of the others we knew. Some of the sweatshirts of our college had “God is a woman” written on them and that probably defines the highly charged air we breathed within the college walls.

Today, with a few years of Real Life having happened to me, I realize just how important that experience was. My friends from college are still some of the nicest, most motivated, interesting and happy people I know. It is hard to imagine that somewhere during all those hours spent giggling and discussing the most trivial of issues, we grew up emotionally. In the spirit of the person I was back then, I will not apologise for being judgmental now and admit that I now know of so many people who did not get that kind of growing experience for whatever reason that might have been and are now adults who have just not grown up, and that is not in an endearing “keeping the inner child alive” kind of way but are characterized with being annoying, stubborn and unable of processing new thoughts.

When I go to my college to teach every Saturday these days, I can still sense the unbridled energy and draw heavily from it to keep me going through some of the occasional difficult days the rest of the week. All of this is probably also a lengthy justification to myself on why sometimes I am such a wimp and think “Ah good, she’s found a friend” and choose to not say anything rather than point out that the class is being disturbed when that quiet girl in the corner talks to her friend with a wide grin on her face.

Revisiting the past

We are back from a trip to Hampi, which ranks high in my "Places marked for consideration of permanent settlement" list. I fell in love with it during my first trip there with my friends two and a half years ago and had jealously looked at all the European backpackers who had set up camp there for a couple of weeks to a few months, bicycling around the ruins with their Lonely Planet in tow, leading the life I had dreamt of for myself.

This time, I went with my significantly better half to show him this little town that had me thus besotted and to get his views on its qualification to the aforementioned list. Hampi effortlessly did her bit and I am happy to say that she's been given the thumbs up by the Mister too.

It is the way in which everything comes together - the history, the architecture, the abundance of places where you can sit down and have a splendid cup of tea, the friendly animals on the road(dogs, cows, cats sometimes) that, depending on the way you are hardwired, you come precariously close to abandoning any plans of a job and a career in your current field and turning over into a history junkie for life at Hampi. If the above list doesn't do it for you, one meal at the Mango Tree will at the very least, leave you with a slightly more positive outlook towards everything.

My back hurts a little from last night's difficult bus journey from Hospet to Bangalore and I have been slow at digesting all new information today thanks to all hopes of even a few precious minutes of sleep being chased away by the monstrosity that was the stretch of road for the first few hours of the journey. We are talking slowly today and have trudged through the day with difficulty but we have already promised ourselves one more trip to Hampi at the next possible opportunity.

(Photo by Trambak)

In a fit of midnight madness...

...I tried my hand at fiction. Below is the result, it hasn't been titled yet:

She ate the piece of chicken as noiselessly as she could. She tenaciously went at the last bits of meat near where the bone bends as they wouldn’t come off easily. She washed it down with cold buttermilk before picking up the stainless steel cup that contained one round scoop of badam halwa. This was a lot more food than she had prepared herself for. She took large bites and swallowed quickly. The last few bites came close to being painful as she could feel the butter in the halwa clogging up her throat. But there was no time to deliberate those trivial discomforts and she searched with her fingers along the surface of the cup to make sure there were no difficult lumps remaining. She could have turned on the light - they wouldn’t be able to see her from the first floor - but she chose to be discreet now that she knew her way around the house rather well.

Five months ago, she had reluctantly left home, the warm familiarity of her sisters’ loud laughter and angry abuses to get on the bus and land here to look after the new-born baby. She had spit out her rage that evening in one long convulsive tirade against her parents and her sisters when it was decided that she would go take up the job of the ayah that their neighbor had informed them of. The five of them had sat mutely watching her burn herself out in her fury, as she cursed their neediness and their self-righteous selfishness that had made it necessary for her to go to the city to earn what to them would be her hefty salary.

As she quietly made her way to the kitchen sink to wash the dishes and remove all evidences of an insolent midnight feast, she looked around at the large living room, and the shadows left by the big bookshelf in the familiar, warm darkness. This was her main work zone during the day, where she spent most of her time feeding the baby and cleaning up after him and creating silly little games for him all by herself. She came back to her room in the corner beyond the dining area, where she ate her meals of roti, dal and vegetables sitting cross legged on the floor twice a day.

Decent folk, she thought, before getting on to the bed, but they need to know that a girl – she needs her chicken curry.

We like them hairpin bends

Today, I waited for that final piece of furniture we had ordered for our living room to be delivered. Now that it is here, it feels just like it did when we placed that elusive last piece onto the 2000 piece jigsaw puzzle I used to solve in my summer holidays along with my mother and cousin.

A lot of life altering changes have taken place since I last posted. First of all, you will start noticing the nonchalant use of ‘Our’ on this blog. Secondly, I am back in Bangalore. Thirdly and a little more obviously, I have changed jobs.

I will always remember that snowball fight we (this is a different we – it consists of me, my flatmate and my neighbours) had on the 13th of Jan, my last night in Birmingham. We were afforded that opportunity thanks to the heavy snowfall in what turned out to be the most severe winter the country experienced in more than 20 years. That was my second snowball fight within a span of ten days and everyone believed they owed me one last experience of knowing how it felt to have a tightly packed fistful of snow landing on my nose with unforgiving force as there was no telling when I would next see that much snow again. I am convinced they also secretly believed they deserved an outlet for having to see off somebody who would wake up with the smug assurance of getting to see the sun every day. I would have probably reacted in exactly the same way if I were to spend a few more months sinking my feet into 2 feet of snow on my way to work and back everyday in that perpetual dim greyness.

This winter has been an experience in understanding orders of magnitude, among other things. While I had managed to know what it took to keep myself safe and warm during the last two winters, all my winter clothing proved to be acutely inadequate when the temperatures went more than 5 degrees C below the average winter temperatures. I even had frostbite on my toes while I was indoors, inside a sufficiently heated apartment! (This is unlike the indoor frostbite I suffered in the previous winter when I was living in what was a virtually unheated apartment that belonged to an ass of a landlord for which I was paying through my nose.) As absurd as it may seem now, I remember days not so long ago, when I used to crave to know again what it felt like to feel uncomfortably hot.

Cut to a month later and I find myself in a Kancheevaram saree on the hottest day in Bangalore in 25 years. And then I realised I didn’t like the heat either.

Apart from highlighting the extremes in temperature and adding my half a cent to the evidence of a messed up ecology to generations in the distant future who might find this blog hidden below a heap of cyber debris, this is meant to be a post to help me take stock and move on.

So here’s bidding an official goodbye to the plants in the balcony, to the purple orchid in my window that I ‘killed with too much love’, the lovely apartment in the city centre, to the canal that flowed beside it, to Victoria Square, to gorgeous Louis, my neighbours’ half Korean, one quarter English, one quarter French baby boy who gave me the most beautiful smile on the day I left, to being addicted to Top Gear, to being a banker in the UK at a time when the word evoked unbridled hatred, to being a doctor’s flatmate and listening to real stories of human lives being saved over dinner, to ploughman’s sandwiches for lunch, to accumulating copper coins with every cash transaction and carrying an unwieldy wallet, to impulsive train rides to Banbury and London, to scones and crumpets, to jacket potatoes, to mulled wine and finally, to all the snow which must have now melted. I loved it while it lasted but as I have said earlier on this blog, it is swell to be back home.

The last few months have seen me go through changes at a rate that is unusual in the normal course of events for a regular person. Looking back from the other side, with the dizziness behind me, I am now in a position to say that I am grateful for changes of all kinds that have sometimes just happened to me with me not being in a position to control anything about their timing or effect. They help provide reference points from which I can identify who I have become. There is also of course, all the learning that comes with change, even if sometimes, you are too dazed to register anything beyond the trivial lesson that when a snowball comes straight at you, all you have to do is duck.

Once among the clouds, atop a white hill........

G,

Remember that day when we were so proud to have successfully dismantled my little cane chair without breaking any of the parts? You responded with just the right degree of urgency and seriousness that the six year old me could expect from a playmate and helped me do a thorough job of it. And I am told the six year old me had extemely high expectations of people.

Today, everytime I get told that I don't come across like an 'only child', I look back fondly on our shared sunny, quirky, magical childhood. I grew up assuming that everybody has a cousin their age living within get-told-off-by-parents-and-run-to-crying distance. When it eventually dawned on me that I might just be one of the lucky few to grow up with the privilege, I was thankful for it. Even if I wouldn't have you know about it then as we were too busy pinching each other's necks and inventing new names to call each other.

If there is something I treasure about my childhood memories - it is the reassurance of knowing that I had you to laugh with, to seethe at my wounds, to conspire with, to get it, to share made-up stories with, to spend summers with and most importantly, to care. And isn't it fantastic that this feeling has endured through it all - through that impossibly difficult age when we wondered about our acceptability/popularity indices to now, when we begin to know the permanent from the transient, to what I know will be always.

During all our singing lessons, I know you weren't particularly thrilled to be told that our pitches matched rather well. One day you woke up with a different voice and several feet taller and that was the end of us standing together and singing for guests at home. I miss that, you know - especially because of how revolting you find the idea.

This is to tell you that you are more precious and important to me than you can ever know. I haven't been the best of sisters and am actually using the occasion of a highly bollywoodised festival to let you know this, and publicly at that (but does two count as public?). But I think you know it comes from the heart. I also know that while the title seems like corny gibberish to the rest of the world, you know exactly what I'm saying.

Love,
Your proud sister.

P.S - did you notice how I'm not trying to get you married off to a nice girl here as I always threaten to?
P.P.S - My brother's a gentleman, he's funny, wise, smart and humble. And oh, he owns two BMWs.

oops.